Very good sentences

"The practice of witch-burning had, in its heyday, a much longer history in western politics than the home mortgage interest tax deduction and yet over time people’s minds changed."

-- Matthew Yglesias

Very good sentences

"Wanting to blame George Bush, or try Dick Cheney for war crimes, is a kind of individual responsibility, but in a very particular political context. "

-- Tyler Cowen in a very good post, about which I don't have much to say, other than nodding in agreement.

Very good sentences

Tyler Cowen on the British "Big Society":

1. It is nice to have a conservative movement which is pro gay rights and reasonably socially liberal, while still fiscally conservative.

2. Their person in charge of naming should be fired and sent to study Orwell. The words "Big" and "Society" make each other sound much worse. I would have preferred "The Small Non-Society," "The Small Society," or "The Big Non-Society," or "The Medium-Sized Hook-Up," among other options.

The only worse name I can think of is Big Society Bank.

Arthur Laffer and His Napkin Revisited

Very good sentences from Daniel Mitchell at the Cato at Liberty blog:

The Laffer Curve is one of my favorite issues... But it is a very frustrating topic. Half my time is spent trying to convince left-leaning people that the Laffer Curve exists. I use common-sense explanations. I cite historical examples. I even use information from left-of-center institutions in hopes that they will be more likely to listen.

The other half of my time is spent trying to educate right-leaning people that the Laffer Curve does not mean that “all tax cuts pay for themselves.” I relentlessly try to make them understand that there is a big difference between pro-growth tax cuts that increase incentives for productive behavior and therefore lead to more taxable income and other tax cuts such as child credits that have little or no impact on economic performance.

Preach it, brother.

Alternative Job Ideas

For the file referenced in the headline file, yes, but also for the "Very Good Sentences" basket:

"Why is there no SF [science fiction] whose author seems to have read and understood even so basic a work as Micklethwait and Wooldrige's The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea?"

-- Stephen Bainbridge, who is also the owner of a magnificent golden retriever

quotable quotes

"Much of the lawyer's craft involves the thoughtful resolution of indeterminacy."

-- Bruce Ackerman, We The People: Transformation

Very good sentences

How do you know if your advice is “unwanted”?

A blunt but wise rule of thumb: If a person wants your advice, he will ask for it.

-- Bryan Caplan

Quotable quotes

"Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come."

-- Victor Hugo

Another very good sentence

"The fact was, I was not nearly as distressed as the adults around me seemed to suppose."

-- Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans.

I am not quite halfway through this novel, so perhaps I should reserve judgment until I finish. But it is quite lovely and is perhaps the best metro book that I have picked up in a while. It is accessible enough for Metro reading, but not so lowbrow as to be stupid. It's about a young British gentleman whose parents disappear mysteriously while living in Shanghai. He grows up to become a detective to the British aristocracy, and one senses that his next battle is to resolve his parents' disappearance. It's the same mix of lush writing and gripping mystery that I loved about Remains Over The Day.

Why I need to learn to use e-mail labels

Facebook friends of mine may remember that I posted a sarcastic Facebook message the other week about a Virginia-bar sponsored CLE (Continuing Legal Education) titled "Taking Control of Your Inbox." Perhaps, however, the joke was on me.

I was doing a natural language search through G-mail for old messages containing a citation to a particular book. Let's say that's the author's name was Mr. Smith (which it isn't really). Instead, I draw up an e-mail message from a close friend, dating back to 2006, which contained the following sentence:

"Then Smith and Mary yelled about will and Kant and Augustine, and how this all translated into why he won't have sex with her."

It made me immediately nostalgic for undergrad.

Very good sentences

I am not sure I would be this kind (See generally Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man (2008)):

"Hoover is one of the tragic figures of modern times. No one illustrated better Tacitus's verdict on Galba, omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset(by general consent fit to rule, had he not ruled).

- Paul Johnson, Modern Times

Sorry for the repeated Paul Johnson quotes. I am only on p. 241 out of 736 (there's more, but all index and footnotes), so they may continue for a while. Also, Pnin is grading, and it's too windy in D.C. for me to feel like going outside. So I'm resigned to prodigious Earl Grey consumption and reading a 700 page book that I've wanted to read for awhile, but would not have time to make a dent in were it not for the long weekend/my better half being resigned to his large piles of exams. Not, however, that any of the above is entirely bad.

Very good sentences

"Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik? There was very little basis for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist network."

-- Paul Johnson, Modern Times

Very good sentences

To steal a page from Tyler Cowen's playbook:

My aspiration is to one day vote for a president who gets the nation to go along with his trillion+ dollar policy proposal by persuading us the trade off is worth it, rather than pretending that there is no trade off. But it seems instead I'll be forced to choose between Republicans who act as though military spending isn't real, Democrats who act as though social services spending isn't real, and George W. Bush, who managed on this issue to be a uniter, not a divider, by pretending that all spending wasn't real.

-- Conor Friedersdorf at The American Scene.